As I was listening to the Professor's rant, the news was playing Sarah Palin in her speech saying to the media, "In honor of the soldiers risking death for you, how about just quit making things up"! Both ladies were really pleading for the same thing: an end to the politics of personal destruction practiced as a disguised inquiry into well known facts that never were true, as the questioner well knows. It is another example of fiction written and spoken as if it is a factual documentary. That is a mind control method brought over from Nazi Germany along with their rocket scientists. You can also see that mind control work being done to us in the Democrats Cap and Trade Tax imposed to fight a totally non-existant CO2 problem.

Reasonable environmental program? Wow, thanks for schooling us drooling nitwits, Professor. When I want well-informed commentary on the economic impact of an enormously complex cap-and-trade scheme, I seek out the advice of some asshole legal academic whose knowledge of economics is limited to the popsicle stand that he ran when he was eight.

Perhaps you should limit your commentary to topics you know something about -- petty insults, snark, and your perverse obsession with and obvious envy of Althouse.

Juris dentist... Do you ever argue a point? Having nothing to offer but ridicule must be easy. What is the environmental program that you need to see rahmed thru even if it destroys what's left of the American economy? What are the environmental impact of CO2 exhaust gasses from coal burning power plants, or from natural gas and petroleum use? So far it has been drastic global cooling.

The thing about rants is, you have to make sure that your anger at X doesn't make you unload on Y. If it's just a freefloating rant, like on YouTube, where people can watch it or not, that's one thing, but going off on your spouse or kid b/c you had a bad day at work (or a coworker b/c of trouble at home) isn't fair.

I remember this Althouse clip, and I'm not sure that it qualifies as a "rant".

It's one of my favorite Althouse clips, and it's an impassioned defense on her part, but it's not unhinged enough to be a rant, is it?

(I think that one reason it's one of my favorites is the hysterically funny snide valley-girl voice of the person she's talking to. If you were going to parody a snotty liberal young woman, you should study this person).

No, it's not because you supported Bush in 2004. My bud, vehement lefty progressive since birth, switched midstream during the primaries from Obama to Hillary after she saw Hills disemboweled, and she was subsequently shredded by her long time online buddies. (Her forum was populated mostly by lefty 20-something guys. I pitied the one lefty who knew Sarah Palin personally and so tried to defend her out of basic human decency.)

@traditionalguy, the correlation is not to Nazi Germany but to Stalinist Russia. George Orwell wrote 1984 and Animal Farm and invented the word "Doublethink" because of his experiences fighting alongside the Communists during the Spanish Civil War. Units that had fought hard and well were derided as a pack of cowards while honor was heaped on units that had never been near the battle.

Orwell left behind some pithy quotes about liberalism that are worth remembering, starting with "So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot."

And for you, especially, Juris Dentist, he wrote "There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them."

Professor, I think you need to reconsider your paradigm. Ann Coulter referred to liberalism as a form of religion, and suddenly a great many things clicked into place for me. Too many of your liberal commenters don't seem to care what reality is; they've received the word from on high (TPM? Daily Kos? JournoList?) and this is the way it is. A single warmer-than-usual summer in Alaska is proof positive of Global Warming. Unusually cold summer in New York? Just weather.

And if you dissent from orthodoxy? Well it's sort of like hard core fundamentalist Christians or Muslim Jihadists. Only with more nastiness.

This Bloggingheads was interesting in that Althouse was finally breaking down about not understanding "empirically" why she was so misunderstood. By another "empirical" thinker..., who when faced with this meltdown, acknowledged she really didn't know so much about this topic after all...and was emotionally upset by how distraught Althouse became about something so empirical.

Some thoughts on rants: Anger arises from a loss of something. The thing we lose when others cast us as a made up character in their drama is our own identity within a known context. A culture is a set of common known context. Examples would be a family, or a church, or a community. The intentional destruction of another's accepted context results in their confusion and feelings of loss, thus provoking anger. Ann's Blogginghead duo kept saying, "I didn't know that it was such a touchy issue". What she meant was she had scored. She had removed Ann's life from its true context to demonstrate her skill in verbal allusions resetting the context, like a play's scenery re-sets context between scenes/acts on the stage. Palin has had the same experiences since last year, and she wants to beat them at their own game. In regard to Nazi mind control scientists, they started doing this work in Newsreels in the 1930s, reporting on events that never did happen and evils that never were there. The Soviet scientists also worked in this field extensively, but they stayed in Russia until the 1990s while we brought the Nazis here in the early 1950s to learn all we could from them.

First, Bravo!, Ann, on as beautiful a bout of passion as I've seen out of you yet! That was great! I'm with Big Mike in asking, "exactly who was that incredibly supercilious bitch you were talking with?" She definitely deserved it - Pow! Right in the kisser! - and that look of satisfaction, creeping across your face towards the end, says you know you delivered.

Second, Axel's rant is about note-perfect as well. I think of him (appropriately) as a little snot but - hey - even little snots have their day and that one was his. Well done.

Finally, as a sort of professional ranter, I can't agree more with the premise there's a place for them - especially today - when so much is so wrong and so few seem motivated to act against it. I'll take passion over "cool" any day, and, whether we're talking about music or politics, I think - as a statement of our humanity - "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" stands as the ultimate.

Penny...Thanks for the feedback.My analysis was harsh. My usual nature is to see the good in people, and that is usually rewarded. But in a "fight" I take a side and will not fraternize with the enemy. That may come from my early training in one on one, and only one wins, sports. Each Blogginghead lady was doing their best to express themselves, and that was beautiful.

Ann pwned the lefty freak chick. I saw the smirk--my video player paused on it during a download catchup moment--it was after Ann vehemently referred to freakchick's side of the blogosphere as being vicious and ugly--of course, that's a personal attack on the vicious and ugly lefty freakchick herself.

Freakchick squirms mentally, emotionally, verbally, and physically. Mute the sound and just watch her nonverbals. She can't even make eye contact with the webcam.

Ann however positively slinks for the cam. You sexy minx.

Warning to freakchicks: do not pick arguments with lawyers, even if they are under cover as cute hot blondies who slink. Unafraid of conflict, know how to dominate, intellectchyall. You will lose.

Ann, you sure are cute on vid. I'm str8 but I'd do you just as soon as I got done with Sarah Palin. LOL

One of the best rants in my experience is the candidly recorded speech John Wayne gave to an ROTC graduating class.

I don't remember what year it was, but he was older and very, very snookered. There was the Duke, laid bare, and, if I remember right, it became obvious that his "character" wasn't a character after all...it was pure John Wayne.